The Giants won with their young pitching, which bodes well for the future

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The Giants used five pitchers to defeat the Royals, 3-2, on Tuesday night. Hayden Birdsong made his first start of the season and threw five innings, allowing an unearned run and zero walks. Randy Rodríguez struck out the side in his inning of work, and Kyle Harrison struck out two of the batters he faced, topping out at 97 MPH.

Camilo Doval pitched extremely well in his two-thirds of an inning, throwing a couple of 101-mph fastballs. Ryan Walker got a calm eight-pitch save, which puts him at 22 pitches over his last three innings. All of them combined to strike out 10, allowing just one walk and seven hits.

And that’s the story of how the Giants kept an opposing team’s bats quiet on a cold night at Oracle Park. If it feels like you’ve seen something like it before, it’s because you probably have. It was the 1,199th regular season night game at the ballpark, and it was the 465th time out of those games that Giants pitching limited their opponents to two runs or fewer.

If you go to a night game in San Francisco, you’ll catch a pitching performance like this more than a third of the time, which is a good thing, considering the Giants are now 418-47 in these kinds of games. It’s as much a part of the franchise brand as McCovey Cove or French vanilla. The pitchers prevent runs, the fans go home cold and happy and the seagulls eat their weight in garlic fries.

A bounce back win at @OracleParkSF 🏡 pic.twitter.com/MqSVz4e9Gj

— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 21, 2025

Look closer at this game, though. Specifically, look at the list of pitchers up there. Walker is the old man in terms of age (29), and Doval is the grizzled veteran in terms of service time, even though he’s just 27. The other three pitchers are just pups who have combined for just over two years of MLB service time, and none of the three have thrown as many innings as a professional as Justin Verlander threw between 2011 and 2012.

All five pitchers featured some of the nastiest stuff that a Giants pitcher has ever thrown. That’s not hyperbole, and a lot of that has to do with the literal arms race that baseball is currently in, with every team finding more and more ways to weaponize pitches and extract the maximum amount of velocity out of an arm. Still, we’re talking nine innings of some of the greatest pitches the city has ever seen, and it’s a city that’s seen plenty of great pitching. The Giants threw 62 fastballs (four-seamers, sinkers and cutters) on Tuesday night, and the average velocity was 96.5 mph. They got just as many whiffs on the breaking balls and offspeed pitches they threw, for good measure.

All these years wondering when the Giants were going to rebuild, and they went and developed a phalanx of young pitchers without anyone paying too much attention.

Time to take a breath? Time to take a breath. You don’t need a history lesson to remember the young pitching staffs that didn’t last. Even when they do last, there’s attrition. The Giants won their first championship in the San Francisco era with four young starting pitchers, they won their second with two and they won their third with just one. If you’re not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch, I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with young pitchers. They’re like an order confirmation from Eggs2You.com that says they’ll be delivered within the week, maybe, if the weather cooperates. It was just a few weeks ago when people were assuming the worst about Harrison’s drop in velocity.

With that disclaimer out of the way, go back to the game. All eyes were on Birdsong because of his return to the rotation, and understandably so. Don’t overlook the other four pitchers who might be around for several more seasons, though. The Giants can’t fit all of their young pitchers into the rotation, to the point where they put a 27-year-old in the bullpen to make room for one. There’s no obvious path for Harrison to get starts, and while you’re contemplating that happy injustice, consider what Carson Whisenhunt has done over his last four starts.

It’s probably time to take a breath again. Some of us have been waiting for Boof Bonser to show up for the last 25 years, and he’s not walking through that door. Please note that absolutely zero chickens are being counted here. We haven’t even entered our payment information on the Eggs2You checkout page yet. The Giants are still quite far from turning these young, superlative fastballs into sustainable success.

But … well, what else do you want to see from the young pitchers right now? You want to see a game like that one. Then another one and another one, but until then, you get to look at nine innings of impressive young arms and dream. If you’re cynical about young pitching, you’ll be right more often than you’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun until you’re forced to stop.

Back in the first couple weeks of the season, when the Giants looked unstoppable, there were more than a couple people who invoked the 2021 season as a comparison. The Giants cooled off quite a bit, but the comparison wasn’t about 107 wins. It was about fun, competitive baseball emerging out of low preseason expectations. It can still apply.

Take a look at the 2021 roster again, though. Even if nobody knew that it was Buster Posey’s final season, nothing about it felt sustainable, at least on a player level. Any optimism that carried over had more to do with the architects of the team. It was a team of veterans and career years, with only one position player younger than 27 getting more than 100 at-bats (Thairo Estrada). The rotation was filled with pending free agents, and the only young pitcher among them was Logan Webb, who came out of nowhere.

This game offered 2008 or 2009 vibes, but in the best possible sense. The Giants have already scored more than the 17 runs they scored in either of those seasons, so they’re not perfect comparisons. They work in the sense that you could look at the accumulated young pitchers and think, yeah, this might be going somewhere. This might be going somewhere really fun. All this season’s team is missing is an inner-circle Hall of Famer going for career milestones, and … wait a second.

That comparison breaks down when you consider what Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain had already accomplished. This year’s group is still very much unproven, and they could be Oops, All Bumgarners! or Oops, All Sánchezes!, with no guarantees that any of them even have the nice career that Jonathan Sánchez ended up with.

Not all young staffs are created equal, and it’s a sobering reminder that the most under-27 pitchers the Giants have ever used in a game was in 2019, when Tyler Beede, Travis Bergen, Sam Coonrod, Trevor Gott, Jandel Gustave, Williams Jerez and Andrew Suárez all appeared in the same game. The Giants lost that one, 9-5. Those seven pitchers have combined for zero major-league innings just six years later (although Gott is currently rehabbing in the Mariners’ system). You can’t even log into your Eggs2You.com account because the two-factor authentication was sent to an old phone number. Young pitchers are tricky, man.

It’s hard to ask for anything more right now, though. The Giants are contending, and they’re winning games with their young pitching. It’s possible to get excited about them in the present, which means it’s definitely possible to get excited about them for the future.

Just a reminder that the German translation of “Birdsong” is “Vogelsong.” Makes you think.

(Top photo of Hayden Birdsong: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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